Help with categorising content

FewFew

I have a bit of dilemma. I'm currently working on a new broad content publication. Content is divided into news, features, culture and sport.
News is quite clear cut, it's the breaking news, current affairs and straight facts no opinion type of stuff.
Sport is also an obvious one.

What seems to be cloudy is the difference between culture and features. Features I had as a more in-depth look at news, investigative pieces, documentaries etc.
Culture I had down as the usual music, art, cinema, fashion.

Where I'm confused is aspects such as health, food, fitness etc. They're being claimed somewhat by the culture editor, but I'm left wondering what happens if we do an expose on crash diets, should that be culture or features?

I'd appreciate some views on the matter. I was taking a very Sunday Times view on the whole thing but I'm not sure if it's appropriate with just four sections.

IRE60

personally I'd say the 4 section start is a bit too restrictive - taking into account that the more sections either the more 'champions' of those sections or they have to be assigned to individual in editorial roles.

'features' it's a bit of a catch all. If Health to a piece over x words - does it fall into features - are they simply 'we write long articles' dep in your case?

Have a look at the guardian website - they have areas nicely boxed off into various categories which I think works well - without a 'features' dep

FewFew

Features, apart from being longer than the quick and to-the-point news sections, is also meant to contain more in-depth investigations into various topics. More documentary style than news bulletin.
We went with four sections so we could have four good section editors who could draw on a pool of contributors rather than everyone on the team having to fill in some sort of editorial role. I really like the Guardian layout, we're mimicking it in certain ways, but we simply won't have the content to justify that many sections and nothing looks worse than clicking into a section and finding one story.

IRE60

then be prepared for the odd bun fight.

the features, as a stand alone, i think should be redundant.

If you have a music reporter (say) working in the "culture" environment - who does a 'feature' on the rise and rise of illegal downloads - is he/she succored by the features editor for that story. Again if the same story is written by a features person - why didn't your acknowledged music guru do it rather than someone in comparison who is second rate?

I think that anything that crosses sections or departments - except ultimate editorial and production - should be thought about (with a mind to canning it!)

You don't have to have as many sections as the guardian. Notably their features are not a section - but a 'tone' (their URL description) within different sections and I am at a miss as to when the qualify a story as a feature